Yahoo reorg: “audience” over here, “publishers” over there

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments — audiences, advertisers and publishers.

Nothing unusual there. Sounds like your good old-fashioned off-line media company. Except, hold on a minute: Hasn’t Yahoo spent the last few years repositioning itself as the big Internet media company which understands that its “audience” and “publishers” are the same people?

This is the message I have heard in conference talks by Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz; it’s the message Yahoo gave by acquiring Flickr and Del.icio.us; it’s the message of the great success of Yahoo’s “Hack Day” events, which deliberately blurred the line between the corporate “us” and “them” in the developer community. Google may have more PhDs and keener algorithms, this vision of Yahoo had it, but Yahoo understood the social dynamics of the new, user-driven Web far better than the competition. Or so it seemed.

So either (a) the message never really made it to the top of the company; (b) it did, but now it’s being jettisoned, which would be too bad; or (c) the reorg will need another reorg real soon.
[tags]yahoo, yahoo reorg[/tags]